We celebrated a quiet New Year's at the cottage while Natasha was adventuring in India. On New Year's day the temperature was above freezing. Nicholas and Gregory still managed to go skiing, but it was foggy and lots of trails at Mt Garceau were closed (10 out of 27 trails open.) There were very few people there and we felt sorry to the ski operators. That said, the skiing was still fun and the snow was quite fast since it was borderline icy; we recommend it desipte the lack of snow.
Of course, on New Year's eve we set off a few fireworks on the lake.
01 January
2007
2007
08 January
2007
2007
I recently used Apple Pages, the document editor, to produce a newsletter. Pages is an elegant and easy-to-use program. It made document creation much more pleasant than it would have been in Microsoft Word or LaTex (which I use for scientif document editing). What 's nice about it is the spare natural interaction -- the interface is well done and responsive. It does not have a lot of fancy features so for an long document, or a document where you need specialized control or fine tuning, it's probably not right, but if you want to assemble something quickly that looks good, it's a solid choice.
One huge gap though, is the utterly awful save-to-HTNL feature. I wanted to put my newletter on the web and expected this to work as it should. Even with a standard example document that comes with Pages, the "save for the web" feature is badly badly broken. It probably works for single-column documents, but anything fancy (like banners or multi-column) seems to throw it for a loop. The feature is so terrible I thought it must have been incompletely installed. No, this is how it works for everybody. It's so bad I think they might have been better off just disabling the menu item. Better not to fool people into thinking they can save to HTML, when so such feature is available. What a pity.
Posted by dudek at 18:33 January 08, 2007
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09 January
2007
2007
The Apple iPhone looks very very promising and has a slew of great features. The prospects for availability in Canada are worrisome though.
Apple announced the much anticipated iPhone January 9th, 2007. There had been literally years of rumors about this device and it seem to live up to much of what people had hoped for. A lot of the promotional discussion has related to the iPod features, which indeed seem very nice. What really excites me however, is the overall feature set and system environment.
Years ago Apple sold the first serious PDA, the Apple Newton, and the Newton included several features that would still be innovative today, include a brilliant (albeit imperfect) recognition egine for cursive hardwriting. I owned one, and have been hankering for similar features on my Palm Treo every since.
The iPhone runs OS X, Apple's UNIX-based operating system. As such, it finally promises to provide an ensemble of real desktop-class appltications in a fully portable device. Sometimes such promises from phone manufacturers fail to come to fruition, but the fact that it runs the same operating system as desktop machines (not a second-rate clone with only a similar name, like Windows CE) makes this promised software a very safe bet.
Further, a comment lament from smart phone users is that...
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There's more. Read the whole story on "Apple iPhone Comments and Observations"
Posted by dudek at 21:20 January 09, 2007
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14 January
2007
2007
We had the first tests of Ramius, the premiere model of version 2.0 of the aqua robot platform, in the open ocean today. The weather in Barbados has been quite rainy, which is unusual for early January, but not exceptional. As a result, we had two major problems: the water visibilty was moderately poor, and the people on land monitoring the tests by computer had lots of trouble with the risk of rain hitting the laptops. As a result, we had a fairly bad weekend, even though we did get some useful data.
There are also some broken wires that developed inside the robot, but those have been fixed all all systems are "go", although we are not almost a day behind schedule. In addition, the silt from the rain can takes days to dissipate, and there is more rain in the forcast.
Despite the problems, there are some exciting tests scheduled for tomorrow including a deep water validation of the Kroy model of Aqua 2.0. If all goes well, we'll take it down to 120 feet at the Stavronikita wreck at the South end of the island. Even in the rain we can run Ramius off the shore with the land users inside a covered boat house. (These tests are the subject of a future blog entry.
While doing the tests,we also completed the rescue diver course we started back home. The skills should be useful for finding lost robots, as well as divers in distress.
20 January
2007
2007
News on the amphibious robot we have dubbed Ramius: version 2 of the AQUA platform. I had previously noted that we were having some problems with the hardware and the weather. The weather eventually improved and while the visibility has remained corrupted, the tests went ahead successfully. We used 3 scuba dive teams to ferry the robot down to 120 feet, take stops along the way to calibrate the strain guage used for depth measurement, and had one team devoted to keeping an eye on the other cognitively loaded diving team(s). The procedure was carefully planned and included precautions in case the robot imploded, or for ditching the gera in case of emergency. After all that, the whole thing came and went very quickly.
We also validated some important new hovering and station keeping behaviors by the robot: various ways of staying on one spot and keeping an eye on things. Some behaviors didn't work well, or couldn't be properly tested. The sub-optimal weather not only hindered visibility, but also led to a high rate of sea sickness. The rate at which we lost fiber optic cables was a bit alarming, but the core requirements of the test went well.
Posted by dudek at 19:14 January 20, 2007
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30 January
2007
2007
Today I had lunch with the president of NSERC and a table full of illustrious researchers and administrators from McGill. NSERC is the federal body that funds most academic scientific and engineering research in Canada. Suzanne Fortier began as president of NSERC at the start of 2005 and she had the good grace to visit McGill. give a talk and meet with various people.
She asked us to provide comments of NSERC funding policies and make suggestions for improvement.
Many of the researchers simultaneously praised NSERC's mechanisms for providing funding, but also lamented the the lack of sufficient funds in the Canadian system. Specifically in comparison with other G8 countries, the sizes of the grants available and the diversity of funding opportunities in Canada is too small. This is a particular problem is areas like robotics, where the core infrastructure costs are not moderated lower costs found in Canada (for example the very low cost of tuition doesn't help pay for equipment or off-campus testing). Fortier was very sympathetic regarding the problems faced by researchers in Canada, and was surprising open to suggestions and enthiastic about hearing about our particular research interests.
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There's more. Read the whole story on "NSERC President visits McGill"
Posted by dudek at 21:32 January 30, 2007
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